Mornings at Jack Pine

Mornings at Jack Pine by Jerry Dennis with ten wood engravings from Glenn Wolff. Jerry turns his keen naturalist’s eye inward as well as outward, finding in the landscape of northern Michigan a mirror for grief, love, mortality, and the fierce pleasures of being alive. Graced with Glenn Wolff’s exquisite illustrations, Mornings at Jack Pine is a small book with large ambitions — funny, tender, elegiac, and shot through with the kind of hard-won wonder that only comes from paying close attention to the world for a very long time.

Set against the rivers, jack pine barrens, and lake country of the upper Midwest, the poems in Mornings at Jack Pine move between precise observation and lyric meditation. The first section is rooted in closely observed rhythms of the natural world — trout rising in tailouts, deer standing in morning mist, a barred owl calling through spruce trees at dawn — and shadowed throughout by the recent death of the poet’s father. The second section unfolds as an extended self-portrait of a man at sixty-nine: a writer, husband, river-watcher, and devoted caregiver to his wife, who is battling dementia. Together, the two sections form a meditation on time, impermanence, and what it means to remain loyal to a place, a person, a life.

The standard lettered copies are quarter bound in a cool green/black smooth goat with dark green Asahi book cloth over boards. Copper foil stamped spine, inset panel with printed title and a small pine tree I carved out of a chunk of lead and blind stamped onto the leather. The book is printed in 3 colors, 6.5x10" (16.5x24.8cm), 51 pages and includes a slip case. $600.00

This is also the first book to kick off the Deep Wood Press Midwest Author Series.

Wind in the Willows